Teaching English the Amistad way

Today I taught my 1st students; the administrators at Amistad University, where I'm volunteering. 3 of them let me practice teach and all 3 were at different ability levels, which made it complicated. The youngest girl appeared to have never learned more than the most basic English before (I guess I was surprised because she works for a company that regularly has to communicate in English). The hardest part wasn't any of those things, however...the hardest part is that there were no teaching materials, and I pretty much had to make the lesson up.

I'm also learning Spanish, along with the other volunteers here, who have turned out to be 6 German girls and 1 Brit, who is only 17. The classes are great because the teachers speak very little English, we get to be immersed in the language for a few hours ;) In spite having taken only the odd Spanish class, I've been bumped to intermediate, mostly because Spanish is so similar to Italian, the language I was quasi-fluent in, once upon a time...

Barrio Jesus does not have a lot going on. There is the 'main square' with the church and elementary school...there are a couple places to grub by Amistad...there is one pub, one newscounter/grocery store and 1 other cafe/restaurant within walking distance. The streets, just to review, have no lines or sidewalks and every walk to school feels like an exercise in survival training, as the cars whiz past and you have to leap over the huge and very deep, mucho pericoloso gutters.

However, the saving grace for me so far is the fact that I have host brothers, although they make me feel a millions years old. All of them speak English, the youngest somehow is the worst at it.in spite of workings for Amistad...and 'cousin Mike' speaks like a native American. On night 2, he, my 2 youngest host brothers and another cousin Chris took me out to play 'spot the tranny'. Then we hung out in a casino in Heredia for several hours. I get the feeling there is not a lot to do here. At any rate, Kate (the English girl) and I are supposed to take a bus into Heredia tomorrow and do a bit of shopping and walking about. Our Spanish is still shit so we'll see how we get on ;) More on that later.